Monday, 11 February 2013

Photosphere in action.

It was a cool nifty feature introduced in the Android 4.2, where the user can create a full blown panorama in 3D with their new Android phone. The how-to-do is a very simple thing to learn where the user needs to start the camera, select the Photo-Sphere mode, and start aligning the camera to let the on-screen-dots fall into the circles. The feature is really cool and will come handy while doing casual camera photography during vacation or parties. Check out this 3D panorama pic I composed while I was attending the Chinese New Year celebrations here in Hong Kong. Apparently the application is like in its initial version stages and there are some obvious issues here. First and foremost being the power usage. My Nexus 4 is not a stellar performer in terms of battery life, and the using photo sphere is an overkill. The single above picture brought my battery from 60% to 55%. Secondly, all the final photos are not perfect. Occasionally you can see the adjacent snaps are not properly aligned in the final image (see the fifth palm tree in the above pic). While the brightness and contrast differences are handled well, the application struggles to align the geometrical shapes that are panning across the adjacent snaps.
Over all, this is an amazing app and a awesome feature to check out in the latest iteration of Android and lets hope that the app gets even more awesome with future updates..